Pigs are flying over Battersea power station once again. And rumours are flying about the unlikeliest of reunions.

It's been 35 years since Pink Floyd released Animals, which, in our retro obsessed recycled vintage any-excuse-for-an-anniversary pop culture, is perfect timing to release a large porcine dirigible over the now rather derelict London landmark that gave Pink Floyd the iconic cover for their 1977 album.

I would have to say the cover, by Storm Thorgeson’s company Hipnogsis , is rather more iconic than the album itself. Animals lacks the beautiful symmetry and cohesion of 1975’s Wish You Were Here and is, rather, a tentative step towards the full scale pop operatic madness of The Wall, dominated by the forceful personality, verbose songwriting and frankly terrible singing voice of Roger Waters, and the eventual dissolution of the classic line-up of the band. It's an interesting if ungainly album, with lots of (what were becoming ) Floyd signatures poking oddly from unwieldy songs linked to a rather sneering dystopian concept inspired by Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which human beings are characterised as pigs, dogs and sheep. It’s not terrible but never becomes more than the sum of its rather disunited parts. But whilst the album may be unloved, the gorgeously absurd image of the flying pig has become synonymous with a band who found a kind of surreal elegance in peculiar juxtapositions and an ego-fuelled sense of excess, and so was deemed an appropriate marketing stunt to promote the re-release of newly mastered digital versions of all 14 Floyd albums.

These days, if you wanted to put a flying animal on your album cover, you’d just do it all on photoshop and nobody would blink an eye. Indeed, even in 1977, Hipgnosis favoured “stripping in” the pig over a photo of the Power Station. The band, however, who never knowingly shied away from excess, insisted the pig had to fly for real. So Hipgnosis built a forty-foot pig shaped zeppelin at great expense and launched it over Battersea.

Actually, they failed to launch it, despite much pig related huffing and puffing, but got some lovely pics of the Power Station in the sunlight. The 11 photographers, eight man film crew and helicopter all duly returned next day. But as the zeppig reached the top of the towers, a sudden gust of wind caused it to twist and break free of its moorings. A marksman had been employed with a telescopic rifle to gun the gas filled dirigible down in case of accident, but, unfortunately, it was quickly realised nobody had asked him for the second day’s filming. As the pig sailed away and disappeared into the clouds, even the helicopter gave up chase after five minutes. The pig came down that evening on a farm in Kent, where the farmer described the descent of a forty foot farm animal as “a bit unusual.” The Hipgnosis crew recovered and repaired the zeppig, and finally got their photo on the third day. However, the band declared they preferred the shots of the sky from day one, so the design team ended up stripping in the pig from day three and retouching the photograph anyway. That story pretty much sums up the money and madness at loose in Seventies rock.

The original pig is no longer airworthy, apparently, and so a new dirigipig had to be constructed for today’s launch. Fine print on the press release also revealed that “unfortunately, the remaining members of Pink Floyd will not be able to attend the event.” This, as we know, is because two are dead, and the rest are barely talking to one another.

Or are they? I heard an odd piece of gossip last week at a music industry bash, when a well connected friend of drummer Nick Mason claimed the band have been in discussions about the possibility of one last tour.

They did manage to previously bury hatchets to reunite, rather movingly, for Live 8 in 2005, and, though they insisted it was a never-to-be-repeated charitable one-off, there has been some indication of rapprochement between the primary combatants. Guitarist David Gilmour and bassist Roger Waters, who usually never have a kind word for the other, made brief guest appearances at each other's shows last year. As for Mason, the most underemployed drummer in rock has often stated that he would love the band to get together again. Keyboard player Rick Wright, of course, has shuffled off to the great gig in the sky, along with original Floyd maverick Syd Barrett. So will it happen? Well, pigs have flown …